Americans cherish their privacy, but as headline after headline brings alarming news of data breaches, governmental snooping, and data mining, it becomes evident that something needs to be done. That’s why more than 30 civil liberties and consumer advocacy organizations have written President Obama urging him to push for legislation that would make new consumer privacy protections law. [More]

Facebook, never exactly a paragon of privacy, has once again been sued by users over allegations of profiting off users’ personal data. This time, the plaintiffs claim that the website is turning links shared in private messages into public “likes,” from which Facebook earns ad revenue. [More]

Last January, a woman in California says she was billed by a hospital for a treatment she never received. She took her complaint to the folks at California Watch, who published a story about her predicament. But when a local newspaper went to verify the information, the hospital’s CEO had absolutely no problem showing up at the reporter’s door to rifle through that patient’s file without her permission. [More]

Because News Corp. has apparently given up any pretensions to respecting the privacy of others, it recently updated the privacy policy for the Wall Street Journal website to allow the company to connect personally identifiable information with Web browsing data without user consent. [More]